Table of Contents for Web Excerpts
- Barnstomers and Early Aviators
- Budget Flying Clubs
- Aviation Records
- VFR to IFR
- Early Airline Development
- Flight Across the Atlantic
- P-40s to Iceland
- Alaska Based Navy P2Y-1's
- Buckner Goes to Alaska
- Ship-to-Ship Battle
- Naval Flight Training
- NAS Instrument Training
- Aleutians Anti-Submarine Warfare
- Search & Rescue
- Gyros and Flight Computers
- Baseball Team Lost in Flight
- Tomcats and Boeing 777s
- Book Order Options
Aviation Flight Control Instruments Developed Before World War II
The Triumph of Instrument Flight
A Retrospective in the Century of U.S. Aviation
Most of the pages in this flying story are devoted to actual experiences from all sectors of aviation. I bring readers into the cockpit. I hope they will enjoy adventure and a learning experience. This is not a "how to" book. In the few instances where technology is pivotal, I try to keep it simple.
Another aviator's book is used as a reference for the birth of his airline. He is Robert Mudge and he is still living in Massachusetts.
The "retrospective" word in the title for this book is an indication that U.S. aviation history was reexamined. For the first time, we can now see that two principal threads in flying, each beginning within a few years of the other, came together and set the stage for the aviation industry that we know today. I will leave to readers to discover what that juncture was and how an essential threshold was then crossed. That portion of the published book, in terms of word volume in comparison with the adventure experiences mentioned above is small, but crucial.
Instrument flight is flying with no earth horizon as a reference. Why is that important? Without the ability to control the flight of an aircraft, from takeoff to landing, despite clouds, haze, smoke, snow and other obscurations to earth and particularly earth's horizon reference, the progress of aviation, strong in its first three decades, would have been completely stunted. In 1929, the newly formed airlines' planes took off in the morning when the weather permitted. They would land in the afternoon and put passengers on a train for the night. The competition was rail.
The sight of the Conductor leaning out of a passenger car, Hamilton watch in one hand and lantern in the other, signaling the Engineer to leave the station, has been repeated millions of times, with almost never a delay for the weather. Air travel needed a way to "leave on time." Some solution to clouds and rain and snow and fog had to be found.
The Wright brothers built and flew the first successful powered airplane in December 1903. In all essential aspects, the Wrights had it right. They needed lift from the wings. To obtain lift they needed a motor to create forward thrust. Just as important, they needed flight control and they got it from flight control surfaces. As pilots, the Wrights exercised intelligent flight control by visual observation of the earth beneath them. Their elevator and their rudder were their flight control surfaces.
Glenn Curtiss came along just a few years after the Wright brothers. The Wrights had developed mechanical expertise in the bicycle business. Curtiss had been building motorcycle engines. Curtiss was able to add power to the airplane engine. Curtiss and the Wrights became competitors.
Early flight control surfaces are visible on Glenn Curtiss' "June Bug" pictured in the story. Upfront is the elevator and behind the pilot was the rudder. Curtiss was later persuaded to put the elevator back with the rudder.
The Wright brothers knew they needed a flight control to counteract the tendency of their airframe to roll to one side or the other. This was accomplished by whichever brother was flying the plane, who as pilot was lying prone on a bottom wing which could flex. Aided by moving his own weight, the pilot could literally warp the lower wing to help control the tendency of the craft to roll from side to side. They had designed their wing to achieve a crude form of aileron control.
Just a few short years after the Wrights' first flight in 1903, Glenn Curtiss improved on wing warping by providing the triangular sections at the end of the wing of his "June Bug," the early "aileron." After the Wright's "elevator" and "rudder," this "aileron" became the third discrete flight control surface. Curtiss moved the aileron by leaning his shoulders left or right to move an actuating cord that stretched beside him in his pilot seat.
The French completed the basic flight controls by giving the pilot foot pedals to control the rudder, and a "stick" to control elevator and aileron. In the meantime, Curtiss had added not just power but also reliability to the engine.
Most important for this flying story, aircraft now had three flight control surfaces and the means to move them. In clear weather, pilots used their visual sight reference to move the flight controls for safely conducted flight.
The retrospective then moves to World War I, then flying the mail using light beacons, and ultimately the third decade of the 20th century, particularly the years 1927-1931. Lindbergh flew the Atlantic to Paris in 1927. He kept awake for 33 hours. Just as important, his radial air-cooled engine kept humming for those 33 hours. Some speculated that the flight was a fluke. All accorded it as a hugely popular event.
In early sections of the book, the reader gets a brief glimpse of the author's first introductions to aircraft, up close. A Curtiss Jenny story is followed by a Stinson Detroiter experience.
The author's 1929 ride in a Detroiter leads to a follow-on appreciation for a very early and very successful corporate aviation experience.
The Lindbergh feat certainly gave a boost to the efforts of a group of aviation enthusiasts, some daring, some cautious, some who blended daring and caution in the right mixture. Month by month in the years 1929-1931, pilots shattered endurance records, one week in the air, two weeks in the air, and more. Other pilots, men and women, month by month, set new point to point speed records.
Consider the National Air Races at Cleveland in 1931. Lowell Bayles of Springfield beat out Jimmy Doolittle for the coveted Thompson Trophy. Bayles was flying the GeeBee, designed and built by the Granville brothers.
St. Louis, Los Angeles and Texas provide stories of early success. Tokyo and Wenatchee, Washington share a story of achievement. Lindbergh makes another important and revealing flight, this time with his wife, Anne. The years 1929-31 provided a plethora of record-making and record-breaking flight events.
For the progress of aviation, the speed and endurance feats were much more important than winning the race or setting a record. Designers and pilots were establishing the aircraft as a reliable, high performance device. All were making history, though in the acclaim of records, some may not have realized the impact.
Collectively, these men and women proved that aviation was here to stay. It would change the history of the world in many ways. The subject of instrument flying would never have become relevant if aircraft had not achieved reliability, and flying them more than a novelty.
While the Wrights and Glenn Curtiss and Igor Sikorsky and the Granvilles and those who flew their aircraft were moving the chalks, so to speak, from novelty to practicality, two brothers and their father had been working in a Long Island laboratory, and with demonstration aircraft, on their vision of an autopilot for aircraft. Their contribution would have the potential to lead to published schedules for air transport departure times, and then, despite clouds, rain and even fog, getting aircraft off at published departure times.
One crucial step remained after the autopilot was demonstrated.
The ultimate blind landing anticipated by Lawrence Sperry in 1914 was still 80 years in the future. It came into being in the last decade of the 20th century in the Boeing 757-767-777 series of transport aircraft and in military aircraft.
When new instruments came to the pilot's panel, and ground/air radio aids to navigation replaced light beacons, instrument flying became the foundation for much of aviation's experience. Book Order Options